Tuesday, December 19, 2017

What did Donald Trump do today?

He observed the passage of a tax bill by repeating obviously false claims about its effect on his personal wealth.

Faced with a blizzard of questions about today's tax bill's obvious implications for Trump's wealth Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders gamely repeated the official Trump line several times: "We expect that it likely will — certainly on the personal side — could cost the President a lot of money."

In fact, it is difficult to identify a single aspect of the bill that would in any way raise Trump's personal taxes--and Huckabee Sanders didn't try to.

This isn't the first time Trump has told insultingly obvious lies about the way the tax bill will affect his personal fortunes, although Huckabee Sanders' version of them is performed with a straighter face than Trump himself usually manages. In a recent speech before a friendly crowd in Missouri, Trump struggled to deliver his lines without laughing, and he got a knowing chuckle from his audience when he claimed his "very wealthy friends" were "not so happy" about the plan.

Unlike every president since Nixon, Trump continues to refuse to release any portion of his tax returns.

Why is this a bad thing?

Good policy rarely needs to be lied about.

Past a certain point, lies can get so big and so obvious that their only real purpose is to show contempt for the people they're told to.